If a plane crashes on the border of two countries, in which country do you bury the survivors?

If you answered something like ‘the bodies are flown back to their country of origin’, you wouldn’t be alone. In fact, in the 15 years or so that I’ve been using this question in my communication skills training only around 20% of people answer correctly – ‘you don’t bury survivors’.

(In fairness, they hear the question. It will be more obvious when you read it.)

Jumping to conclusions/making assumptions/not listening is such a common human trait, it’s surprising any of us manage to communicate successfully at all.

I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.

We’ve all had the “that’s not what you told me/I know what I said/I know what I heard” conversation when we’re totally convinced we’re in the right. The truth is Confucius was spot on when he said “I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.”

We have to ‘do’ listening.

Seth Horowitz, auditory neuroscientist and author of ‘The Universal Sense: How Hearing Shapes the Mind’, says “the difference between the sense of hearing and the skill of listening is attention”.

And there’s the rub. While hearing is a passive activity (we don’t even need to be awake to do it) listening is an active activity. Or rather it should be.

Processing auditory information

For most of us, listening is just too hard. It’s not even our fault that it’s hard. We’re not being lazy. It’s just the way our brains are wired.

According to ‘Achilles’ Ear? Inferior Human Short-Term and Recognition Memory in the Auditory Modality’, when it comes to memory, our brain processes auditory information differently than visual and tactile information. In other words, we often remember less of what we hear and more of what we see and touch because the brain uses separate pathways to process information.

Seth Horowitz explains the problem further when he says that hearing is easy. We’ve been doing it for millions of years. It’s our alarm system, our way to escape danger. But listening, really listening, is hard when potential distractions are leaping into our ears every fifty-thousandth of a second — and pathways in our brains are just waiting to interrupt our focus to warn us of any potential dangers.

Add all that neuroscience to the fact that most of us aren’t half as interested in others as we are in ourselves, and we’re on a hiding to nothing.

The ‘not listening’ cycle

Let’s be honest. What do we do when we’re on the phone to a friend or family member? Sit down and listen or use it as an opportunity to load the dishwasher or check our emails? What do we think about when a colleague/manager/client is telling us something? What they’re actually saying or what we’d like to say if they’d just shut up for a second?

We’d like to think that when we’re talking to someone they’re hanging on to our every word, taking in what we’ve said and responding appropriately. No way. Here’s what really happens.

• You speak
• I hear
• I filter out anything of no interest to me
• You continue to speak
• I pick up on something I want to respond to and (this is the best bit) I then practise in my head what I want to say
• You slow down momentarily
• I dive in with what I want to say
• You hear
• You filter out anything of no interest to you
• And so it continues…

So the only way to break the cycle is to ‘do’ listening – make it an activity that we actively participate in.

Here’s how it’s done.

The ‘active listening’ cycle 

• Start by telling yourself that the other person must have a good a reason for wanting to you talk to you
• Force yourself to stop what you’re doing and give them your full attention
• Turn your whole body (not just your head) so you can both see and hear them properly
• Use affirmations such as ‘sounds interesting’ and ‘go on’ to express and help maintain your interest
• Paraphrase what they’re saying in your head to help you understand and remember – and to stop yourself practising what you want to say!
• When they stop talking, summarise what they said and ask if that’s right
• Ask open questions to elicit further information if required
• Ask closed questions to confirm understanding

Trying to be helpful

There is one other reason why we jump to conclusions and don’t always listen as well as we could. We’re often just trying to be helpful.

We use our knowledge of what we think is being asked to offer solutions before we’ve listened to what the problem really is. We hear the words “I have a problem” and dive straight into “I have a solution”.

In my ‘survivors’ question, the people who answer ‘the country of origin’ aren’t bad listeners, they’re just good people. They’re being alert, picking up signals, responding to problems and acting quickly to solve them. Qualities that usually stand us in good stead.

However, in effective communication skills, we need to learn to be both responsive and reflective. Easier said than done. Easier to hear than listen to.

Photo by Christina Sicoli on Unsplash